Universal Inbox to Unite the Digital Text Mess

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In most cases, technology aims to simplify. But when it comes to
text-based digital communications — e-mails, texts, chat
messages, tweets and Facebook correspondence -- the technological
mess only grows messier. Today, turning on one’s mobile device
after leaving a movie theater could reveal an array of different
text communications waiting across several different formats in
several different places.

To untangle that mess, programmers have developed apps and
interfaces specifically to merge a user’s various text
correspondences into a single electronic reservoir, a kind of
“universal inbox” that sends and receives text communications
regardless of their origin.
Google’s Gmail allows users to chat, send SMS texts, and make
voice phone calls (with visual voice mail, another text
function) from their inboxes, Facebook is currently testing its
own e-mail service that layers an “@facebook.com” address on top
of Facebook’s existing messaging and chat features, and mobile
apps such as Samsung’s “Social Hub” collect users’ many social
networking and messaging streams into one centralized place.

However, since people rely on those different definitions to
inform them about the urgency or seriousness of a communication,
human nature has proven a larger barrier to implementing the
universal inbox than any technological challenge.

“When we’re getting information from 600 different places, is
there a point at which it’s too much?” said Amy Bruckman, an
associate professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive
Computing. “That’s a reasonable question to ask. And then the
question becomes: How can people manage that more effectively?"

Context matters

Each of the various methods of text communication came about in a
different way, at a different time, and with different ends in
mind.
SMS, for instance, was designed to send short text messages
over voice networks before Web-enabled smartphones turned many
mobile devices into data streaming pocket computers. SMS' larger
counterpart, the MMS, was developed to send larger multimedia
messages via phone networks, but they were delivered by in a
completely different way . Similarly, e-mail was devised to send
longer text correspondence and file attachments across data
networks, moving from computer to computer but not from phone to
phone or between computers and phones.

There is really no technological barrier to the universal inbox,
but it’s trivial to collect all of our communications in a single
bin if we can’t make sense of it, Bruckman said. Our various text
communications media are like different channels to which we
prescribe different levels of importance. A universal inbox,
Bruckman argues, strips users of the only means to gauge the
relevance of a message without actually delving into the content.

“There’s nuance to communications mediums, and the way that
people use these things expressively to communicate different
meanings to different people in different areas of their lives
has tremendous expressive power that people use to their benefit
every day,” Bruckman told InnovationNewsDaily. “Smashing it all
together is kind of a crude suggestion in a way.”

From many, one

Of course, should software or hardware find another way to
provide context, users might embrace a universal inbox more
readily.

“Every channel serves a purpose for that person at the time,”
said David Daniels, CEO of e-mail marketing consultancy The
Relevancy Group. “I define relevance as the intersection of
content and context.”

Daniels doesn’t view the “universal inbox” as an impossible
notion. The way he sees it, smartphones already provide a
hardware solution to the problem, bringing disparate text media
into a single place. But further merging
them into the same inbox, regardless of source, platform or
device, is something few people realize they can do — or even
want to do at this point.

“You first have to have a well-established, unified need that
stretches across society before you end up with a text-converged
future that looks the same to most people,” said Stuart Lipoff,
Chairman of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Standards
Committee. “People have such different needs that there doesn’t
seem to be enough uniformity."

Lipoff touches on the heart of the problem: While it’s
technologically very feasible to build a universal inbox, each
user’s priorities, needs and definition of relevance is
different. While he sees the universal inbox as a powerful idea,
technology must first produce a means for average people to
easily configure a set of complex filters to help them manage
their digital lives, or -- and this is the holy grail -- create
an inbox that can automatically configure itself around each
user’s unique needs and preferences.

The smart inbox

In other words, the universal inbox needs better artificial
intelligence-. The system must understand each user’s habits,
what he or she considers relevant, and automatically organize
messages the same intuitive way different channels already do.

That technology is coming. As Lipoff points out, some consumer
electronics are already imbued with advanced artificial
intelligence (AI) features, and some interfaces, such as Google’s
Gmail, are rather adept at learning user behaviors and
prioritizing incoming text communications. But AI that's capable
of an effective universal inbox simply isn’t widely available.

However, the questions really isn’t “why don’t we have a
universal inbox?” Rather, it’s “what would we do with all that
information if we did?” Bruckman said.